October 30th, 2012 by Brian Beeler

Samsung SM843 and SM1625 Enterprise SSDs Released

Samsung has refreshed their enterprise SATA SSD offering with the SM843 and has added the SM1625, their first enterprise SSD using the SAS interface. The launch comes as Samsung tries to expand their SSD growth in the enterprise while attempting to fend off the numerous upstarts that have gained momentum with lower cost, higher performing and higher endurance SSDs over the last year.

Samsung SM843

The SM843 takes over as Samsung's entry and mainstream SSD for the enterprise, that leverages Samsung's own 20nm MLC NAND, controller and firmware. Where prior versions of the SATA-based SM line have been generally designed for more read intensive activity, Samsung is pitching the SM843 as the perfect mainstream mixed workload drive. The 7mm drive height also makes for flexible use cases, the drive will find its way both within servers and embedded solutions, along with the new breed of flash arrays. Many arrays like the Pure Storage flash array use consumer SSDs now, but can benefit from the enterprise features like additional over-provisioning in the SM843 and near price parity with the similar consumer SSD, the Samsung SSD 840 Pro.

In terms of performance, the SM843 posts sequential read performance of 520MB/s, writes of 420MB/s and up to 70,000 sustained random read IOPS. In addition to raw performance, Samsung has tried to attack latency through firmware enhancements, offering an 80% improvement over the prior gen drive. When it comes to endurance, Samsung has made tremendous leaps, the SM843 supports 1064TBW with a 4K workload, which is a 1600% increase over the 60TBW in the prior drive. For enterprise users who need it, Samsung also offers optional power fail protection.

Samsung SM1625

The SM1625 is Samsung's first dual-ported SAS SSD and is designed to address the high-performance enterprise SSD market. The SM1625 ships in 100GB, 200GB, 400GB and 800GB capacities in 15mm drive height. Like the SM843, the SM1625 uses Samsung's 20nm MLC NAND, proprietary controller and firmware.

The SM1625 features up to 23,000 sustained random write IOPS, and randomly reads up to 101,000 IOPS when using both ports. The SSD writes data sequentially at up to 740MB/s and reads at 848MB/s when using both ports. The drive also offers super capacitors to protect data in-flight during a power loss situation.

Samsung did not offer endurance or warranty information on the SM1625.

AvailabilityBoth drive are shipping now, with pricing based on quantity and channel.